Bazna R7: Ivanchuk beats Shirov, leads by a point
Don't write him off yet! In a marathon game of 84 moves, Vassily Ivanchuk defeated Alexei Shirov today and increased his lead to a full point in Bazna, as Boris Gelfand drew with Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu. After six draws Teimour Radjabov won his first game, against Gata Kamsky, who is now on a terrible 1.5/7.The 3rd Kings Tournament, a six-player round-robin with Radjabov, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Gelfand, Kamsky and Nisipeaniu, takes place June 14-25 in Bazna, Romania.Round 7
So far it hasn't been going too well with Gata Kamsky. The American is in poor form and after seven rounds he's all the way down the standings with 1.5/7. It's not that he's playing that terrible, but it seems that he still has problems in the opening phase, so that it just takes too much time on the clock to reach a satisfactory position. In many games he does manage, only to follow-up with a big mistake, which is exactly how he lost to Radjabov.Nisipeanu's opening was fine this time: in a Petroff he improved upon an old Kholmov game and got a small but lasting advantage in the ending. However, Gelfand is Gelfand, and the Israeli defended the position to a draw on on move 74.The game of the round was of course Ivanchuk-Shirov. Repeating the 4.Bg5 line Radjabov had tried before against Shirov in Bazna, Ivanchuk came up with a strong novelty. White seemed to be getting very strong pressure when Black suddenly found a great way to change the type of position.The ending with three pawns against a piece should have been a draw, but first Shirov missed a threefold repetition, and then after some inaccurate moves he allowed Ivanchuk to push his h-pawn, and then after seven hours of play Shirov committed a big mistake, where he could still hold it. A fantastic performance by Ivanchuk, whose persistence was rewarded in the end.Games round 7
Click on the pairings at the top of the board to reveal a drop down list of all the games. Click on the arrow under the board just once, then the arrow keys of your keyboard also work. Silverlight works on all browsers and platforms except for Linux, but this should be fixed soon. Contact us for questions, not in the comments section, please.[TABLE=746] [TABLE=754] Photo courtesty of the official website, used with permission
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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